Never mind the European Union and the gradual erasing of national borders. How about this? This intriguing map of Europe designed by Freddy Heineken, the Dutch beer tycoon. It comprises small territories with more or less equal, ethnically homogenous populations of between 5 and 10 million. The general idea was that a greater number of smaller states would be easier to govern within a European union than a group of bigger competitive countries continually trying to dominate the group (you can see a list of Heinekin’s proposed countries here):

This map shows a hypothetical Europe without Germany!.. There were a few similar plans to this at the close of World War II in 1945. Some were Nazi propaganda, but the Morgenthau plan to dismember Germany did exist and was seriously considered for a while. The Bakker-Schut Plan put together in the Netherlands at the end of the war proposed the annexation of parts of Germany, renaming of towns and cities, expulsion of the population and so on:

The right map above shows how the borders would have changed if the Allies had used the Morgenthau plan on Germany (drawn by Condottiero).

This very interesting map from 2007 concerns the Polish parliamentary elections. The overlay shows the border between the Russian and German Empires as it existed before World War I. Areas formerly part of Russia backed the conservative Prawo i Sprawiedliwość (“Law and Justice”) party, while those that used to be in Germany tended to support the right-wing liberal Platforma Obywatelska ("Civic Platform") party:

How about this map of the United Kingdom, featuring Brit Lit or all the major figures in literature over the last several hundred years? There’s even a place for Bram Stoker on the North Yorkshire coast near Whitby, which of course is one of the locations in the famous novel:

Also on a literary theme, here’s a map all about book publishing. Countries are shown by the size of their domestic publishing markets. Europe, Asia and the USA are huge, indicating the strength of their publishing industries. In contrast, Africa and the Middle East hardly feature in the map, since the number of books published in those regions is very low compared to other areas of the globe:

And finally, on a similar theme, here we see how the map of the world would be transformed if the inhabitants of the countries with the largest populations moved to the countries with the largest geographic area. Interestingly, although China would take over Russia, Indonesia moves into China, Pakistan becomes Australia and Canada becomes India, the United States, Brazil and a few other countries stay where they are:

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